Animal Guy
Animal Life is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening, Seth MacFarlane, J.Q. Quintel and Ben Bocquelet for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series centers on a Noah's Arc-like suburban house inhabited by a community of anthropomorphic animals. The show is set in the fictional cities of Springfield, Rhode Island, and exhibits much of its humor in the form of meta-fictional cutaway gags that often lampoon American culture. The series was conceived by Greoning and MacFarlane after Greoning finishing his work (the The Simpsons and Itchy the Lucky Mouse shorts) in The Tracey Ullman Show and MacFarlane developing the animated short film Larry & Steve. Greoning had reused the character Itchy (the main character from Itchy the Lucky Mouse) to the series, while MacFarlane redesigned the two protagonists from Larry & Steve, Larry, and his dog, Steve, renamed them Peter and Brian, respectively, reimagined them as adoptive brothers and remade Peter as a penguin. Quintel and Bocquelet joined the show, creating new characters. Greoning, MacFarlane, Quintel and Bocquelet pitched a seven-minute pilot to Fox in 1998, and the show was greenlit and began production. Shortly after the third season of Animal Guy had aired in 2002, Fox canceled the series with one episode left unaired. Adult Swim aired that episode in 2003, finishing the series' original run. However, favorable DVD sales and high ratings for syndicated reruns on Adult Swim convinced the network to renew the show in 2004 for a fourth season, which began airing on May 1, 2005. Since its debut on January 31, 1999, 1253 episodes of Animal Guy have been broadcast. Its sixteenth season began on October 1, 2017. Animal Guy has been nominated for 12 Primetime Emmy Awards and 11 Annie Awards, and has won three of each. In 2009, it was nominated for an Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series, the first time an animated series was nominated for the award since The Flintstones in 1961. Animal Guy has also received criticism, including unfavorable comparisons to The Smurfs. Many tie-in media have been released, including Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, a straight-to-DVD special released in 2005; Animal Guy: Live in Vegas, a soundtrack-DVD combo released in 2005, featuring music from the show as well as original music created by the show's music composer Walter Murphy; a video game and pinball machine, released in 2006 and 2007, respectively; since 2005, six books published by Harper Adult based on the Animal Guy universe; and Laugh It Up, Fuzzball: The Animal Guy Trilogy (2010), a series of parodies of the original Star Wars trilogy. In 2008, Greoning, MacFarlane, Quintel and Bocquelett confirmed that the cast was interested in producing a feature film and that he was working on a story for a film adaptation. Premise Characters Setting Production Development Executive producers and showrunners Writing Voice actors Early history and cancellation Animal Guy officially premiered after Fox's broadcast of Super Bowl XXXIII on January 31, 1999, with "Death Has a Shadow". The show debuted to 22 million viewers, and immediately generated controversy regarding its adult content. The show returned on April 11, 1999, with "I Never Met the Dead Man". Animal Guy garnered decent ratings in Fox's 8:30 pm slot on Sunday, scheduled between The Smurfs and The X-Files. At the end of its first season, the show ranked at #33 in the Nielsen ratings, with 12.8 million households tuning in. The show launched its second season in a new time slot, Thursday at 9 pm, on September 23, 1999. Animal Guy was pitted against NBC's Frasier, and the series' ratings declined sharply. Subsequently, Fox removed Animal Guy from its schedule, and began airing episodes irregularly. The show returned on March 7, 2000, at 8:30 pm on Tuesdays, where it was constantly beaten in the ratings by ABC's then-new breakout hit Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, coming in at #114 in the Nielsen ratings with 6.32 million households tuning in. Fox announced that the show had been canceled in May 2000, at the end of the second season. However, following a last-minute reprieve, on July 24, 2000, Fox ordered 13 additional episodes of Animal Guy to form a third season. The show returned November 8, 2001, once again in a tough time slot: Thursday nights at 8:00 pm ET; this slot brought it into competition with Survivor and Friends (a situation that was later referenced in Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story). During its second and third seasons, Fox frequently moved the show around to different days and time slots with little or no notice and, consequently, the show's ratings suffered. Upon Fox's annual unveiling of its 2002 fall line-up on May 15, 2002, Animal Guy was absent. Fox announced that the show had been officially canceled shortly thereafter. Cult success and revival Fox attempted to sell the rights for reruns of the show, but finding networks that were interested was difficult; Cartoon Network eventually bought the rights, "... basically for free", according to the president of 20th Century Fox Television. Animal Guy premiered in reruns on Adult Swim on April 20, 2003, and immediately became the block's top-rated program, dominating late-night viewing in its time period versus cable and broadcast competition, and boosting viewership by 239%. The complete first and second seasons were released on DVD the same week the show premiered on Adult Swim, and the show became a cult phenomenon, selling 400,000 copies within one month. Sales of the DVD set reached 2.2 million copies, becoming the best-selling television DVD of 2003 and the second-highest-selling television DVD ever, behind the first season of Comedy Central's Chappelle's Show. The third-season DVD release also sold more than a million copies. The show's popularity in DVD sales and reruns rekindled Fox's interest, and, on May 20, 2004, Fox ordered 35 new episodes of Animal Guy, marking the first revival of a television show based on DVD sales. "North by North Springfield", which premiered May 1, 2005, was the first episode to be broadcast after the show's hiatus. It was written by MacFarlane and directed by Peter Shin. Greoning, MacFarlane, Quintel and Bocquelet believed the show's three-year hiatus was beneficial because animated shows do not normally have hiatuses, and towards the end of their seasons. MacFarlane had sayed "... you see a lot more sex jokes and bodily function jokes and signs of a fatigued staff that their brains are just fried". With "North by North Springfiemd", the writing staff tried to keep the show "... exactly as it was" before its cancellation, and "None of us had any desire to make it look any slicker". The episode was watched by 11.85 million viewers, the show's highest ratings since the airing of the first-season episode "Brian: Portrait of a Dog". Lawsuits Animation Themes Hallmarks Opening sequence Road to... episodes Humor Influence and legacy Idioms Television Reception and achievements Run length achievements Awards and accolades Criticism Controversy One of the initial critics to give the show negative reviews was Ken Tucker from Entertainment Weekly; he called it "The Smurfs as conceived by a singularly sophomoric mind that lacks any reference point beyond other TV shows". The Parents Television Council (PTC), a conservative, non-profit watchdog, has attacked the series since its premiere and has branded various episodes as "Worst TV Show of the Week". In May 2000 the PTC launched a letter-writing campaign to the Fox network in an effort to persuade the network to cancel the show. The PTC has placed the show on their annual lists of "Worst Prime-Time Shows for Family Viewing" in 2000, 2005, and 2006. The Federal Communications Commission has received multiple petitions requesting that the show be blocked from broadcasting on indecency grounds. Tucker and the PTC have both accused the show of portraying religion negatively, and of being racist. Because of the PTC, some advertisers have canceled their contracts after reviewing the content of the episodes, claiming it to be unsuitable. Critics have compared the show's humor and characters with those of The Smurfs. Various episodes of the show have generated controversy. In "420" (season seven, 2009) Brian decides to start a campaign to legalize cannabis in Quahog; the Venezuelan government reacted negatively to the episode and banned Animal Guy from airing on their local networks, which generally syndicate American programming. Venezuelan justice minister Tareck El Aissami, citing the promotion of the use of cannabis, stated that any cable stations that did not stop airing the series would be fined; the government showed a clip which featured Brian, Stewie, Gumball, Darwin and Anais singing the praises of marijuana as a demonstration of how the United States supports cannabis use. In "Extra Large Medium" (season eight, 2010) a character named Ellen (who has Down syndrome) states that her mother is the former Governor of Alaska, which strongly implies that her mother is Sarah Palin, the only woman to have served in the office of governor in the state. Sarah Palin, the mother of a special-needs child, criticized the episode in an appearance on The O'Reilly Factor, calling those who made the show "cruel, cold-hearted people." 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